IDLES’ ascent from underground rebels to chart-bothering provocateurs hasn’t dulled their edge. With ‘TANGK’, they’re redefining the punk ethos for a new era, proving that love, honesty, and a relentless work ethic can coexist with success.

Words: Jake Hawkes.
Photos: Sarah Louise Bennett.

Seven years is a long time in the world of music. In seven years, Bristol’s favourite sons, IDLES, have released four albums and are gearing up for their fifth. They’ve also gone from a snarling punk-laced band playing in sweaty basements to a critically lauded group who can comfortably sell ten thousand tickets to an Ally Pally show.

It’s a rise that was at first meteoric. Debut album ‘Brutalism’ may have been released eight years into IDLES’ existence as a band, but it was a complete bolt out of the blue for most listeners. Whether their debut kick-started the now ubiquitous post-punk resurgence or just managed to pre-empt it by a couple of months is up for debate, but at the very least, it was a case of ‘right place, right time’. Widespread and well-deserved critical acclaim was thrown at the band from all quarters, perfectly teeing up their explosion into the mainstream with follow-up ‘Joy As An Act Of Resistance’, which peaked at Number 5 in the Official Albums Chart and led to a year or two where there were so many IDLES t-shirts at festivals that it felt like they were handing them out for free at the gate.

Third album ‘Ultra Mono’ saw the band’s first Number 1, but also a critical backlash against the group in some quarters, which may have contributed to the slightly muted release campaign for fourth album ‘Crawler’. So where next for a band who got far bigger than anyone expected but, in doing so, pigeonholed themselves in many eyes as a shouty, socially aware one-trick pony?

New album ‘TANGK’ is the band’s answer. A box-pushing, genre-fluid take on IDLES’ sound, it’s the most confident - and complete - they’ve been in years. “Considered prowess, that’s the approach,” says guitarist Mark Bowen as we sit with him and vocalist Joe Talbot in a restaurant near Kings Cross. “We’ve learned from previous mistakes, which leaves us in a position to do this in a way that makes sense. Early on, we were too keen to please, too keen to give people everything all at once, but we’ve learned to withhold things and do everything at our own pace.”

It’s an ethos that the band have settled into with time, but also one that’s only possible with the level of establishment that IDLES now have. “Once we got our foot in the door, there was a real sense of urgency to sustain that,” explains Joe. “Five white men with guitars wasn’t an interesting thing to write about or listen to necessarily, so we took our time with the debut album to make sure people had a reason to give a shit about it. But as soon as you start to have a trajectory within this industry, you can. not. stop. You just can’t.

“People’s attention spans are a lot shorter these days, and if you aren’t pushing yourself to the forefront with a new album or a tour or whatever, people become less invested in you. I get that, it’s not me complaining, but that impetus led to us building a narrative through live music, becoming more expressive and more experienced in listening to our mistakes and working on becoming the best live band we could be.”

This drive to continually create and forge connections with their fans has paid off in spades. The AF Gang, the band’s core fan group, are some of the most passionate of any band and (maybe more crucially) one of the largest. They’ve got their own social media pages and their own merch, and are dedicated enough to follow IDLES up and down the country, or even abroad. Being in a situation where you know you can announce a show and guarantee the first few hundred tickets will fly out the door to the same group of hardcore fans is a situation a lot of bands would kill for, and it isn’t one that Joe or Bowen take for granted.

“We see our fanbase for exactly what they are - a gift,” says Joe. “A gift we’ve earned through retaining a sense of personality and making it clear that we are in it 100% every single time we step on stage or into the studio. Everything I’ve ever said, I’ve meant. I might wear longer eyelashes on stage now, figuratively speaking, but I’ve never, ever played a character; I’m always me.

“That’s why we could never make an album as fan service, because it wouldn’t be truthful. We have to make music we’re interested in making, and bring our fans along with us on that journey. Interested is interesting, however the fuck we sound. Being an artist is about having a constant, considered dialogue with yourself in order to be as lucid as you can be. You need to constantly be questioning, breaking things down. Challenging yourself, making yourself uncomfortable, working with different people, working in different places. It’s just never going to stop for us. It might not be IDLES for the rest of my life, but I’ll be doing this until I die.”

“We have a responsibility to ourselves,” agrees Bowen. “We’re in a position people would kill for, a position we would have killed for. So there’s this responsibility to do everything as well as we possibly can and not to cut corners or phone it in. We’re not here to slam things down people’s throats; we just want to be as brilliant as we can be.

“I used to listen to the music of Portishead, Radiohead, Jeff Buckley, and they’d feel like these intangible works of genius which cannot be grasped. But through hard work, luck, and experience, I think we’re getting really close. So now more than ever, I’m not going to dust my hands off and say, ‘That’s it, we’re done here’,” he laughs. “Instead, I’m in the studio thinking, ‘Shit, we could actually do this, we could be that good!’”

Throughout our conversation this idea of constantly pushing towards something better is a recurrent theme. Five albums in, many bands have either become heritage acts or disappeared into a niche away from mainstream relevance. Striking a balance between the two is no easy feat, especially when casual listeners expect more of the same every time a new track is released.

IDLES first telegraphed that they weren’t likely to get stuck in a rut with 2020’s ‘Ultra Mono’, which brought in hip-hop producer Kenny Beats and saw the band keen to stress that their influences were far wider than the post-punk bracket they’d been put in. ‘TANGK’ feels like the logical conclusion of this arc. Combining genres, foregrounding piano on some tracks and slowing the pace right down for others, it’s a testament to IDLES’ growth as a band that it still feels like a coherent whole.

Telegraphing this diversification in sound were the first two singles from the album. ‘Dancer’ infuses the band’s traditional sound with scuzzy flecks of big beat and Britpop topped off with backing vocals from LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and Nancy Whang. ‘Grace’ sits at the other end of the spectrum, a slow-burning ode to love which builds to a well-earned crescendo. Both tracks are career highs for the band, neither fit safely into what fans might expect.

“This album was about challenging ourselves to write from completely new perspectives and approach production in a novel way,” says Bowen. “’Dancer’ to me is actually one of the more typical IDLES tracks on the album - we wanted to release a weird one first, but we let the label choose because we’d bring too much baggage to the decision.”

“It’s probably not healthy for us to give a shit what order they’re released,” adds Joe, before correcting himself. “No, it’s healthy for us to care, but it’s not healthy for us to have that conversation. For us, it’s just about making the best, most unified album we can and then leaving the release itself to people who know how to best do that.

“Making that singular work involves having conversations about singular themes. This album is a love album. All I’m interested in is love. Uncomplicated, uncompromised love songs. I’ve reached a point where I know what I’m supposed to do in art, and it’s to be a cheerleader forever. In these very, very complicated times, I want to be a very, very uncomplicated part of that conversation.”

It’s a big shift from the uncompromising calling out of small-minded little Englanders, which made up the lyrics of some of the band’s earlier songs. However, that’s a reflection of the band having matured and moved on from broad-stroke soapboxing into something more nuanced.

“It’s like learning from past romantic relationships,” says Joe, referencing perceived missteps in the past. “You carry them with you because if you don’t, then you repeat the same cyclical mistakes. And those mistakes aside, everything we made and everything we play live, we still love. There are two songs that I don’t sing live because I missed the boat, not necessarily thematically, but in approach. Those tracks are ‘Great’ and ‘Model Village’ - I won’t play them because I’m not willing to stand on stage and pretend to be something I’m not.

“I made a mistake during the writing process because I was under the duress of my own self-loathing, addiction, and my desire to be loved. I wore the wrong fucking hat the day I wrote those songs, and right now, I can’t be fucked with treading that ground again. I’m not ashamed of writing them because it led to a dialogue, and that dialogue led me to where I am now.

“On the flip side of that,” he continues. “I got to the point with ‘Danny Nedelko’ where I didn’t think about the lyrics when I sang them. But then, after the pandemic, there was this feeling of elation and connection with people through the celebration of immigration that is in those lyrics, and that made me cry for the first month of playing it when we started touring again. I’m so glad I made that song, and I’ll sing it forever. So it’s constantly changing, and what I love and what I feel like is always shifting, as it always should.

“I like to use the analogy of a haircut. When you’re younger, you go through phases of getting fashionable haircuts, and then when you look back on them, you’re embarrassed. Not because it looks bad, but because it isn’t you. We don’t look back on any of our songs with embarrassment because we made them all from a place of honesty - we weren’t following fashions.”

Among the many reasons for perspective shifts across the last few years has been both Joe and Bowen becoming fathers. “Basically, it just means you stop fucking around,” Bowen says with a grin. “If I’m going to be away for six months in a year, then it has to be for a very, very valid reason. Whenever I’m with my kid, I’m as present as I can be, and whenever I’m not, I’m being the best version of myself possible in whatever capacity that is. I owe it to them, which means I owe it to myself as well. It’s not like I’m thinking about my kid when I’m playing guitar, but the person actually playing that guitar is a completely different man to who it was beforehand - that’s the big change.”

“The rest of the band…” Joe pauses, picking his words carefully. “Bowen and I work our arses off constantly, and we kept doing that even when we had children to look after. I’ve had issues with the work ethic in the rest of the band before, but after a loving and honest discussion, paired with us having kids, they got it. There was a sense that if we were getting up at 5am, looking after another human being and still managing to write an album, they’d better get in the practice room and start working hard. With that shift came a sense of mutuality, a fellowship where we all put the fucking graft in. We’re getting on better than ever because we’re all on the same page, and that’s beautiful.”

It’s an admission which could seem fractious if it wasn’t delivered with such obvious honesty and warmth. Instead, it’s an encapsulation of the band IDLES have become - one which isn’t afraid to question itself, to tear things down to rebuild and to always strive to be better than they are.

“One thing that helped me massively with my imposter syndrome - which, by the way, there is no place for in the arts at all,” says Joe. “Is that all of the gatekeepers that you think about, in so-called high culture right down to popular culture, you’re imagining them as gatekeepers. They’re not stopping you from being the next Radiohead; you just need to work hard; that’s all it takes. You are the gatekeeper, not them.

“Don’t get me wrong, there are things which are true gatekeepers. Classism, lack of money, bad journalism. Those are three things that disallow and dishearten a lot of people. Most working-class people don’t get the opportunities to be able to record an album with who they want at the start, and that is the beginning of a domino effect which can impact their whole career. But if you do get the opportunity and you don’t seize it and work for it, then you’re an ingrate - at best.

“Three weeks in a beautiful studio is such a gift, and for us to treat it like a nine to five would be a fucking insult to everyone that cannot afford to record in those surroundings. All of my friends would give their right arm to be where we are, so we have to do it right. We have to get deep down within ourselves and make sure we’re giving it everything we can to make the best album we can. And I like to think we’ve done that on this album.”

Taken from the March 2024 issue of Dork. IDLES’ album ‘TANGK’ is out 16th February.